© Helena Rubinstein FoundationHelena Rubinstein promoted herself as a "beauty scientist."
The crime in question is Schueller's collaborationist activity during the Nazi occupation of his native France during World War II, activity that books like Monica Waitzfelder's L'Oréal Took My Home: The Secrets of a Theft and Michael Bar-Zohar's Bitter Scent: The Case of L'Oréal, Nazis, and the Arab Boycott have already treated in some detail. But for Brandon, whose previous works include Singer and the Sewing Machine: A Capitalist Romance and Automobile: How the Car Changed Life, the fascist dealings of L'Oréal's chief merit additional exploration because the Polish-born Rubinstein "was a Jew," and because, "in 1988, Schueller's business swallowed Rubinstein's." From this confluence of factors, Brandon tries to produce evidence of a drawn-out, high-drama "standoff between Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller."
Unfortunately, this premise is fatally undermined by several basic facts. Schueller and Rubinstein never met, nor ever, at least in Brandon's narrative, betrayed the slightest awareness of each other's existence. They lived and worked in cities whose political and business cultures could not - particularly during World War II - have differed more: Paris (Schueller) and New York (Rubinstein). They were not even competitors, as L'Oréal's core business during Schueller's lifetime was hair dye, while Rubinstein's was, and remains, makeup. Except for the untimely but, tragically, far-from-unusual death of one sibling in a Nazi camp, the worst instance of anti-Semitism that Brandon uncovers in "Madame" Rubinstein's life is the "no-Jews policy" of a Park Avenue co-op she wanted to move into. (In this case, moreover, Rubinstein had the last laugh: "Enraged, Madame bought the building.") L'Oréal's 1988 acquisition of Helena Rubinstein postdated the deaths of the two companies' founders by several decades. And finally, France's recent affaire Bettencourt, which Brandon presents in her book's last chapter as yet "another episode in the standoff," has nothing whatsoever to do either with "the fact" of Rubinstein's Jewishness or with Schueller's wartime endeavors. First making headlines in France in 2007, this affaire centered initially on the vast wealth that Schueller's daughter and heiress, the octogenarian Liliane Bettencourt, had settled upon her friend François-Marie Banier, a notorious fortune hunter. The scandal has since expanded to include unseemly revelations about Bettencourt's campaign contributions to President Nicolas Sarkozy, among others. Barring some still-to-be-revealed connection between Banier or Sarkozy and Helena Rubinstein Inc.'s cosmetics - and no such connection surfaces in Ugly Beauty - it is hard to see how this affaire confirms the existence of a protracted, embittered feud between Rubinstein and Schueller.
The "standoff," then, is essentially a MacGuffin, but to readers unfamiliar with the particulars of Eugène Schueller's life, Ugly Beauty does offer a chilling portrait of a man whose support for Third Reich policy and practice went far beyond the passive, go-along-to-get-along acceptance that so many French collaborators have since claimed as their position.
In September 1940, just three months after Paris fell to the Nazis, Schueller was the first person to sign up for a new political party, the M.S.R. (Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire), whose avowed mission was "to construct the new Europe in cooperation with National Socialist Germany and all the other European nations liberated, as she has been, from liberal capitalism, Judaism, Bolshevism and Freemasonry," as well as to promote "severe racial laws to prevent such Jews as remain in France from polluting the French race." Even by right-wing standards, the M.S.R. was viewed as "the extreme of the extreme," Brandon writes, led as it was by a "crazed fanatic" named Eugène Deloncle, whose preferred political strategy was murder - and whom Marshal Pétain himself found so terrifying that he tried to dissuade Schueller from backing the man. Schueller, however, ignored the warnings, providing the M.S.R. with funds and even meeting space "adjacent to his own luxurious offices in the L'Oréal building" in Paris. Although Schueller broke with Deloncle later in the war, he maintained a pro-German stance to the end, providing some Nazis with a L'Oréal van "to evacuate both themselves and their loot" when the Americans' arrival forced them to flee in 1944.
Such gestures, according to Brandon, were "governed more by pragmatism than doctrine," for good relations with the Nazis gave Schueller continued access to the raw materials he needed for L'Oréal and Monsavon, his soap company. Certainly his business boomed as a result: L'Oréal's profits quadrupled over the course of the war, while Monsavon's doubled. Yet his fascism was rooted in ideology as well. In a public speech he gave in Paris in 1941, Schueller declared that "I believe in an authoritarian state, properly led," and that "I consider it impossible to build a representative state based on universal liberty and equality. . . . Everyone must realize that many are his superiors and deserve more than he." That same year, he also addressed the M.S.R. on the dangers of "Freemasonry and Jewry," and published a book in which he noted that the French would do well to obey "what these days are called 'Führers of the professions' " - a privileged elite in which he of course included himself. Not surprisingly, after the war Schueller was tried for both personal and industrial collaboration. And although he was acquitted, he continued to support former members of "Deloncle's band of brothers," as Brandon calls them, many of whom found employment at L'Oréal.
As for Schueller's ostensible nemesis, the Manhattan-based Helena Rubinstein, the war boosted her business as well. Because "glamour was recognized as being of the greatest psychological importance" in the Allied countries, cosmetics sales spiked; her company's profits nearly doubled between 1941 and 1942 alone. During this same period, Madame also sold the United States Army kits of toiletries for every G.I. deployed in the invasion of North Africa; sunscreen and camouflage makeup, not to mention deodorant and cologne "for use where no bathing facilities were available," became lucrative new additions to her product line. (" 'Men could be a lot more beautiful,' Madame observed hopefully in 1943, and if she had anything to do with it, they would be.")
Meanwhile, Rubinstein's ethnic background did not, until the Nazis murdered her sister, translate into any particular sympathy for Europe's persecuted Jews. "She had refused to live on New York's Upper West Side because it was 'too Jewish,' " Brandon writes. When Marc Chagall "asked her for some money to help relatives escape from Germany, she told him to try elsewhere."
In these respects, and notwithstanding the opposing roles Brandon wants them to play, Rubinstein seems rather more like Schueller than unlike him. Both come across as ruthless, bigoted entrepreneurs who knew how to make money off a world war. In the looking glass of history, the two moguls' brand of "beauty" casts an ugly reflection indeed.
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